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Collecting Headlines Funnier Than This

Hashing out headlines at The Onion: From left, Will Tracy, Dave Kornfeld and Todd Hanson.Credit
Damon Winter/The New York Times

Headlines in the satirical weekly newspaper The Onion tend to function both as punch line and setup, in that order. They are the heart of the paper, and not only the first thing anybody reads, but also, unlike headlines in real newspapers all over the world, the first things to be written. The staff devotes the first two days of every week to composing headlines, then assigns the articles that will run beneath them and provide a body of supporting jokes.

It’s immediately apparent just flipping through “Our Front Pages: 21 Years of Greatness, Virtue, and Moral Rectitude From America’s Finest News Source,” the new, platter-size hardcover collection, appropriately enough, of front pages from The Onion, that the art of the fake headline has evolved. Early-era front-page type in the paper, founded in 1988 in Madison, Wis., had the clownish tone of a college-town humor rag: “Depressed? Try Liposuction on that Pesky Head.”

“You can see it took a little while before the paper was keyed in on the USA Today model,” said Joe Randazzo, the current editor of The Onion. (From 1998: “Inside: America Rates The Skin Colors. See Society, page 1D.”)

The paper relocated to New York in 2001, and that year, prompted partly by 9/11, the headlines took on what Mr. Randazzo called “more of a New York Times-Washington Post kind of tone — sober, important.” “We wait to chime in on a news event until after the news has chimed in,” he said. “The Onion’s charter is to be the last word, the newspaper of record. That’s a total conceit, of course, but we take it seriously, in the sense that we want to be the joke that’s making a joke about all the other jokes.”

A Tuesday in October found Mr. Randazzo and nine writers and editors gathered around a conference table in the SoHo offices of The Onion for a headline meeting. Each had a printout of 101 headline contenders, which had been submitted —mostly by one another, with some support staff and freelance contributors also allowed to pitch in — the day before.

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At the offices of The Onion in SoHo, headlines are conceived first, and then articles are assigned to flesh them out.Credit
Photographs for Damon Winter/The New York Times

“It’s a very specific, regimented format,” said Dan Guterman, the head writer. “You sort of learn the Onion language by rote. We spend hundreds of hours in the room deconstructing the jokes. I don’t think there’s anything comparable to the amount of material we generate and reject just to come up with the week’s headlines.”

This structured process, however, has an element of chaos, in that there is no such thing as speaking out of turn. Each person called out favorites by number, and most were rejected by consensus, or, as needed, by Mr. Randazzo.

This brain trust was all men — all 10 of them white, most in glasses, about half wearing T-shirts with something satirical printed on them, and at least 60 percent of them with facial hair. (“The dominant style” in the office of The Onion, the author Wells Tower wrote last year in The Washington Post Magazine, “is the unshaven, underexercised, Nazarene look of bookish people who probably suffered a steady program of jibes and wedgies in junior high school and carried pocketfuls of 20-sided dice.”)

The basis of some rejections was historical: “That reminds me too much of ‘Man Who Thought He’d Lost All Hope Loses Last Additional Bit of Hope He Didn’t Even Know He Still Had’ ” — a headline from 2000 — Todd Hanson, a story editor, said about “Man Surprised He Still Had Peg to Be Taken Down.”

Others failed to meet standards of sophistication. “That’s basically a man-boobs joke, a yucka-yucka joke,” Joe Garden, the features editor, said of “November Named Male Breast Awareness Month.” Or comic rigor: “It has a finality to it that threw me off,” Mr. Guterman said of a headline about a missing tub of yogurt.

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Todd Hanson, a story editor, started at The Onion 21 years ago.Credit
Photographs for Damon Winter/The New York Times

Or structural soundness: Mr. Randazzo gently deemed one headline “inert,” and quickly moved the meeting along. Or decorum: “That joke in the wrong hands could be unspeakably offensive,” Mr. Randazzo told Seth Reiss, a staff writer, about a headline that, if it had the potential to be too offensive for The Onion, is not likely to be reproduced in this newspaper.

A headline stating that the Norwegian Nobel Committee chairman was revealed to be President Obama’s best friend from high school was an obvious no-go —it would be stale long before press time — but still engendered admiring debate.

“Are we sure we don’t want to do that just to show a bunch of pictures of him and Thorbjorn Jagland on the basketball team together?” Mr. Reiss asked.

“Thorbjorn Jagland’s a great name,” Mr. Hanson said.

“It’s so metal,” Mr. Garden said.

Headlines that made it often needed little discussion. “Cherokee Tribe Makes News As Fraction of Actress’s Bloodline” was a keeper from the start.

The meeting stretched from 10 a.m. until 3 p.m. and included a short lunch break during which several writers were asked to brainstorm individually on a broad idea — the enduring war in Afghanistan — that was proving to be a challenge. In the end “U.S. Continues Quagmire-Building Effort in Afghanistan” won out over “Quick and Painless Overthrow of Taliban Enters Eighth Year” and “Afghanistan Rapidly Replacing Iraq as Replacement for Vietnam as Replacement for Quagmire.”

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Corner pen: Dummy, the office dog, has her own office cubicle.Credit
Damon Winter/The New York Times

After that, Mr. Randazzo assigned articles to support the headlines according to a vaguely rotational system. Someone jokingly suggested, with a combination of affection and envy, calling in Megan Ganz, 25, a former staff member who left over the summer to become a writer for “Important Things With Demetri Martin” on Comedy Central: “Does she have enough to do?”

This is an old story at The Onion. Another whiz kid, Mike DiCenzo, departed recently when he was hired to write for “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.” Ellie Kemper, a frequent contributor, got a major acting role on “The Office” this season. Before them, several alumni from the paper’s days in Madison, Wis., found great success as writers and producers of “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” “The Colbert Report” and “Futurama.”

The paper’s function as a farm league has a complicated legacy, and the few who remain from the early-era Onion see themselves as defenders of its ethos. “There used to be a certain bond everybody shared, like we were in a band,” said Mr. Hanson, 41, who started at the paper 21 years ago after he dropped out of college. (“I went to the University of Wisconsin from 1986 to 1986,” he said.) “Plenty of the original staff never did have a lot of ambition beyond making each other laugh. I don’t know, but there’s something just different about people who’ve come from real-world, minimum-wage jobs.”

The Onion, a free weekly that is also online at theonion.com, has a print circulation of 400,000. It claims 1.8 million followers on Twitter.

Mr. Garden, who began writing for The Onion in 1993, said he wrestled with the notion that staying at The Onion was akin to being left behind. “A lot of the editors who went to L.A. sort of figured out the system; meanwhile, I still don’t know the system,” he said. “I’ve never written a spec script. There’s this fear that because I’ve done this for so long, there’s nothing else I can do.”

Yet The Onion continues to feel like home. “It’s different now, but there’s still camaraderie,” he said. “I don’t feel alienated along age lines, I just feel alienated — but the way I always do.”

A version of this article appears in print on November 3, 2009, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Collecting Headlines Funnier Than This. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe